The Church's Idolatry of Israel

“which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt” at the moment (Rev 11:8). Any guesses as to why?

by Don Clasen

Feb. 16, 2014

“So let‘s say they [the Americans] say something. So they said it! They said it! 80% of Americans support us. It‘s absurd.”

– Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli Prime Minister at the home of an Israeli family, 2001.[1]

“Every time we do something you tell me America will do this and will do that . . . I want to tell you something very clear: Don’t worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people control America, and the Americans know it.” 

– Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, October 3, 2001[2]

“They batter down the doors of the White House as soon as its support for Israel wavers: when Bush asked Ariel Sharon to pull his tanks out of Jenin in 2002, he received 100,000 angry emails from Christian fundamentalists, and never mentioned the matter again.”

-“The U.S. Government’s Agenda: Christ’s Second Coming?” by Wes Penre[3]

2001 must have been a walking-on-air time for Benjamin Netanyahu and the elite planners in Israel. The first quote above is from a Channel 10 special report in Israel while he was visiting a family earlier that year. In it he bragged about how he sabotaged the Olso Peace Talks when Clinton was President. (He seems to have done it by the way, by threatening to release tapes of phone sex between Clinton and Monica Lewinsky gained by Israeli espionage.[4] All we got from our highly-biased American media however, was that its failure was all Arafat’s fault.)

The Sharon quote was just after 9-11. The latest evidence coming out seems to suggest that the entire World Trade Center complex was designed from its beginning in the 1970s to be an elaborate hoax, a complicated, multi-decade theatrical production­­­­ conceived of by David Rockefeller and his New World Order plan to turn the planet into one big police state.[5] In Act 3 or 4, Larry Silverstein and his all-Jewish consortium of businessmen “just felt a compelling urge” to buy a property the whole city knew to be a complete white elephant. The worst of its drawbacks was that it was filled with thousands of tons of asbestos fire-proofing that needed to be removed by law with a bill of about a billion dollars attached.

Nonetheless, Larry was shrewd. With a mere $616 million down, he purchased the property for $3.2 billion then took out insurance he made sure covered terrorist attacks.[6] Amazingly, just seven weeks later the complex was coincidentally attacked by terrorists. As of 2008 he had collected about $5 billion and is in the process of trying to collect another $11 billion from the airlines![7] And oh yes. Haaretz once reported that ever since the days when Netanyahu served as Israeli ambassador to the UN, he calls Silverstein “every Sunday afternoon, New York time…It made no difference what the subject was or where Netanyahu was..”

That’s not a friend; that’s a spymaster and his sayan asset. Soon after buying it, Silverstein shut down the entire complex for a week to bring in Mossad teams to wire the buildings with explosives. His admission in a PBS documentary where he recounted telling the New York City Fire Department to “pull” building 7 the afternoon of September 11 is a hutzpah-laden, backhanded public confession the other two had also been wired at the same time. There’s no way you just decide to demolish a 47 story skyscraper in downtown Manhattan and three hours later it’s done! It takes weeks, even months to comply with all the regulations and paper work alone, not to mention the sheer impossibility of rigging that many explosives that quickly.[8] It also shows you how much of the highest levels of the City of New York government were complicit in this dastardly crime.

Destroyed For Lack of Knowledge

Stories such as these—and believe me, there are myriads of them in the history of modern Israel and her bloody, perpetual sabotage of the governments of the earth and their people—bring Christians who are rabid, unthinking supporters of Zionism face to face with a great contradiction according to the Bible, namely, is God the Author of evil? Does Israel have the right to resort to the Devil’s tactics to accomplish their (albeit twisted) version of God’s purposes? Did not the Apostle Paul say that those who claimed he was teaching, “Let us do evil that good might come of it” deserved damnation (Ro 3:8)?

“Brethren, be not children in understanding: howbeit in malice be ye children, but in understanding be men” says I Corinthians 14:20. And herein is the problem with the Church’s attitude toward Israel—that she has the understanding of children, yet with disastrous and not just ineffective consequences. This children’s attitude goes like this. “God said He was going to bring Israel back to the land in the last days. Therefore we need to work with God in this by giving Israel our unconditional support.”

A mourning older brother holding his sibling. Their parents were killed in an israeli air raid

Indeed, the American Church’s naivete about the nature and aims of the State of Israel and her knee-jerk support for anything and everything this nation wants to do, accurately summed up in that first quote by one of our most prominent enemies and grateful cynics, is  indeed “absurd.” Like possibly to the tune of $1.6 trillion worth of absurd as far back as 2002. And that’s just one measurement.

Quite frankly, the United States is second only to Israel as the biggest rogue nation on the face of the earth, both of whom love to defy international law and the wishes of the entire world constantly. They don’t do this in a corner but openly, zealously and without apology. And Israel doesn’t do it because of resentment for centuries of perceived persecution both real and imagined, but because the Talmud teaches them they literally are entitled to live by a double standard of their own rules with no accountability to the rest of the nations. For “normal” people who can barely even conceive of such an irresponsible attitude, such high-handedness constantly goes right over their heads.

The Church ought to understand this but she’s as lacking in discernment in this as anyone else. Israel’s return to the land is not as a reward for their patience and faithfulness over the centuries of diaspora but as a testament to God’s defense of His own Name-“I do not this for your sakes, O house of Israel, but for mine holy name’s sake, which ye have profaned among the heathen, whither ye went” (Eze 36:22). It doesn’t matter that generations of Jews for centuries would pray every year at the Seder, “Next year in Jerusalem.” Neither is it a reward for faithfulness or patience or suffering persecution as they might suppose but because God is setting up a trap for Him to “purge out the rebels” from their midst (Eze 20:38). And those rebels are His old nemeses, the Pharisee/rabbi movement.

Jesus vs. the Pharisees

Jewish ideologues will never understand this because they are the ones to be purged out.  Neither have they understood nor accepted why they were flung out in the first place—their rejection of Jesus Christ as Messiah:

If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes. ⁴³ For the days shall come upon thee, that thine enemies shall cast a trench about thee, and compass thee round, and keep thee in on every side, ⁴⁴ And shall lay thee even with the ground, and thy children within thee; and they shall not leave in thee one stone upon another; because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation. 

-Luke 19:42-44

³⁷ O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not! ³⁸ Behold, your house is left unto you desolate. ⁹ For I say unto you, Ye shall not see me henceforth, till ye shall say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord.

-Mt 23:37-39

And nothing has changed about that, neither then nor now. The first wave of judgment came  in 70 A.D. with the destruction of the second Temple and another at Masada in 135. In the centuries following those days, many of the rabbis led the people back to Babylon no less, the house of bondage! There they perfected their usurpation of God’s authority with the promulgation of endless commentaries built upon the Mishnah, the collected Laws of the Pharisees complied by Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi around 200 A.D. As bad as their “traditions of men” were in the days of Jesus, their rejection of His teachings helped to crystallize their thinking and made their philosophy of superiority over the Gentiles even more radical.[9] Thus it was not until two centuries after the birth of Jesus that the religion of Judaism was formally born, in complete distinction from the Law of Moses and its fulfillment in the New Covenant of Jesus Christ.

The Siege of Jerusalem, 70 AD

One of the reasons they rejected Christ as Messiah (and there were at least a half dozen) was because they wanted to dictate to God what kind of Messiah they wanted and what He should do for them. They weren’t interested in a “man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” who would die for the sins of Israel and the world as the ultimate Passover Lamb (Isa 53:3,5,10, etc). “Sins? What sins? We’ve got the law and its rituals to absolve us.” (Jn 9:34; Mt 3:6-8). [10] “We’ve got the law, we’ve kept it, and anyhow we’re the sons of Abraham,” was pretty much their attitude (Mt 3:9; Jn 8:39).[11]

In contrast they were very interested in those prophecies about a military commander (Isa 63:1-6 e.g.) who would deliver Israel from all her enemies. When Jesus refused to use His miracle power against the Romans however, it became but one of many indictments against Him. Yet in His faithfulness He will fulfill that role in His Second Coming when He returns to save Israel from her enemies (Zech 12:10). As a spillover of the Battle of Armageddon, after a pitched battle over Jerusalem half the city will be saved and the rest taken into captivity (Zech 14:2). Seven thousand will also perish in a great earthquake at that time (Rev 11:13).

Romanticizing the Maccabees

“I tell you and promise in the spirit of the Maccabees, we will not allow Iran to receive a military nuclear capability.”

-Benjamin Netanyahu, “Netanyahu Holds First Meeting with Pope Francis,” Jerusalem Post, December 2, 2013

Given the history of the Pharisees one can understand why they thought this way. They emerged as a sect in the afterglow of the heroic Maccabean overthrow of Antiochus Epiphanes the Seleucid king in 165 BC. This Antiochus, in collusion with some upper class Jews tried to completely Hellenize the Jewish people, suppressing all Hebraic expressions of their religion and culture. He even went so far as to desecrate the altar of the Temple by placing a statue of Zeus on it and sacrificing a pig on the altar. A rural priest, Mattathias Maccabee and his five sons led a rag tag uprising through guerilla warfare, eventually driving the Seleucids out and cleansing the Temple.[12] The annual feast of Hannukah celebrates the claimed miraculous extension of Temple lamp oil until more could be obtained.

The Pharisees no doubt closely identified with the Maccabeans by social class and their zeal for religious purity and greatly resented the Romans who were the next conquerors. A Messiah who would finish what the Maccabees started I’m sure was greatly appealing to them. If Christ had been willing to use His miracle powers on routing the Romans,  it would certainly have made Him more appealing, even though His opposition to their cherished traditions was what they hated the most.

But of course He did not—He came to save them from their sins, an idea they also rejected along with His rebukes of their burdensome additions in their claimed Oral law. An element of Jewish ideology ever since the days of the Zealots seems to have a real affinity for armed rebellion, right up through Communism and modern terror tactics. It wasn’t blessed by God with the Romans (it was God’s will for them to submit to their rule—Mt 22:21), and none of it is blessed today. They just get away with it because America, largely due to millions of Evangelicals, is Israel’s biggest enabler.

The Church’s Idolatry of Israel

There’s this popular saying in our time, “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk.” Well, Israel is driving drunk and the Church is no friend of hers, anymore than Israel is a friend of anyone. We are their worst enablers and they are off “on a trip” with their own fantasies and delusions of grandeur. There was an Israeli author I believe, who was going to publish in his book the actual statistics of how much direct cash money was going into the hands of the fanatical and evermore abusive Israeli settler movement. He came under pressure to leave them out because American Christians donated more money than American Jews by a wide margin!

Who is kidding whom here? The Church believes that unconditional support for Israel is to fulfill God’s will, even while aware that the prophecies predict disaster ahead for her? No matter to most Christians, they’ll be long gone in the Rapture, or so they assume. Leave it to Israel to suffer the consequences. Israel for her part doesn’t believe in these prophecies anyway and so doesn’t take them seriously. But of course she is more than happy to take our “absurd” support through Church donations and shaking down our Congress.

This is a friendship? This is healthy? This is honest and real?

Here are some of the American Church’s problems in her relationship to Israel:

1. Shallow philosophy.

Here is the simplistic Evangelical approach—one verse will do—“ I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee” (Gen 12:3). Yet this is but a personal promise God made to Abraham concerning his coming years of sojourning. How can this be a template for dealing with all his descendants when 400 years later God is laying out curses before Israel if they break His covenant in Deuteronomy 28? In fact, the first 14 verses there He devotes to promised blessings for obedience, the next 54 to the curses that will befall them for disobedience!

And how many times did He make good on that threat in their subsequent history? How can Genesis 12:3 be a foundational principle when Christ Himself cursed the fig tree which Christian Bible teachers assert so emphatically is a symbol of Israel (Mk 11:21)?

2. A partial reading of the prophecies of return.

Once people realize that their reliance on Genesis 12:3 is a shallow and lazy argument, they usually go to Paul’s principle that “God is able to graft them in again” (Ro 11:23). Fine. But the question is how is He going to graft them back in, when, and under what conditions?

And it shall come to pass in that day, that the Lord shall set his hand again the second time [the first being the return from Babylon ca. 536 B.C.] to recover the remnant of his people, which shall be left, from Assyria, and from Egypt, and from Pathros, and from Cush, and from Elam, and from Shinar, and from Hamath, and from the islands of the sea…

And I will bring you out from the people, and will gather you out of the countries wherein ye are scattered, with a mighty hand and a stretched out arm, and with fury poured out…

And I will bring you into the wilderness of the people, and there will I plead with you face to face.

Like as I pleaded with your fathers in the wilderness of the land of Egypt, so will I plead with you saith the Lord God.

And I will cause you to pass under the rod…And I will purge out from among you the rebels, and them that transgress against me…

And ye shall know that I am the LORD, when I shall bring you into the land of Israel, into the country for the which I lifted up mine hand to give it to your fathers. 

And there shall ye remember your ways, and all your doings, wherein ye have been defiled; and ye shall loathe yourselves in your own sight for all your evils that ye have committed.

And ye shall know that I am the LORD, when I have wrought with you for my name’s sake, not according to your wicked ways, nor according to your corrupt doings...I do not this for your sakes, O house of Israel, but for mine holy name’s sake, which ye have profaned among the heathen whither ye went… be ashamed and confounded for your own ways, O house of Israel.

-Isaiah 11:11; Ezekiel 20:34-38,42-44; 36:22,32

And who might these “rebels” be? If you ask people as confused as the Rev. Hagee, he would tell you it’s the Uri Avernys and all the other wimps, peaceniks, secularists and liberals in Israel. God will tell you it’s the most radical Zionists, settlers, and Jewish fundamentalists in the land that He’s going to purge:

^“And it shall come to pass in that day, that the prophets shall be ashamed every one of his vision, when he hath prophesied; neither shall they wear a rough garment to deceive [e.g., prayer shawls, rabbinic garments, black 18^th century Lithuanian clothing, etc.]:  But he shall say, I am no prophet, I am an husbandman; for man taught me to keep cattle from my youth” (Zech 13:4,5. The only people keeping cattle in Israel are the settlers.)

Is Burlap rough enough? “And it shall come to pass in that day, that the prophets shall be ashamed every one of his vision, when he hath prophesied; neither shall they wear a rough garment to deceive” (Zech 13:4). Half a Million Orthodox Protest Military Service Bill in Jerusalem, Mar. 2, 2014

3. Ignorance of Judaism and Zionism.

Christians naively believe that Judaism is simply the study of the Hebrew Scriptures from Genesis to Malachi, what we call the Old Testament, yet without recognizing or wanting to recognize Christ as the fulfillment of those prophecies. Belief that the Hebrew Scriptures are authoritative is actually considered a very serious heresy within Judaism known as Karaitism, with only about 30,000 practitioners world-wide.

Judaism itself is a completely new religion that didn’t even get its official start until a couple of centuries after the birth of Christ. It pretends to the outside world that it is the study of the Hebrew Bible but it is not that at all. It is based on the Talmud, the collected laws and customs of the Pharisees (Mishna) to which was added early commentaries (Gemara) and a vast body of later “commentaries on commentaries” stretching out into the 19th Century.

Christians also don’t understand that Judaism is an evolutionary religion, adding by the 16th Century A.D. the Kabbalah to its canon of foundational documents. The Kabbalah is the product of centuries of evolving Jewish mysticism that includes outright occultism, magic and superstition mixed with a cosmology of racial supremacy. In fact, you could make the argument that one of the essential consequences of all the rabbis’ arguments in the Talmud was the claim that they gave themselves the power to overrule and add to God’s decrees (in spite of many warnings not to–e.g., Deut 12:32).

With the Kabbalah, they invented a completely new cosmology, contradicting the Creation account found in Genesis. In Genesis it says God spoke the universe into existence. In Kabbalistic cosmology, they change God’s very nature now from a personal Deity to an impersonal “First Cause” they call the “Ein Sof.” This “thing” at one point contracted into itself, then exploded into a Big Bang (no doubt the origin of that ridiculous theory of the universe) and the world came into being.

This process however created a lot of debris which they identify as the souls of the Gentiles. Therefore to “help God out” and “repair the Universe” (tikkun olam) they must clean up this debris (eliminate it? subdue it? what?) and then the Jews can inherit the earth. Ironically, most modern Jews consider tikkun to refer to bringing about true progress for mankind, a position that is perfectly alright with me. But this is the hard core origins of it.

Aside from the incredibly insulting nature of this doctrine (not to mention its stunningly-ignorant anthropology), we can see the absurdity and self-deception of the “logic” behind all this. You cannot take a document (the Bible) which gives you a special status, lift that status out, plant it into another belief system, then mislead the world around you as to which story you actually believe.

Well, at least you can’t do it ethically, but that too is not a problem for them. Since there’s so many Gentiles to get rid of and God is both overruled (and redefined to boot), now “it is allowed,” indeed you must, resort to manipulation and deception to subdue the enemy. Hence the slogan over the entrance to the Mossad’s headquarters, “Through deception thou shalt wage war.” For more on this and how they built their rationale, see “Anti-Semitism or Anti-Gentilism—Which Is It?”

Mixing Politics and Religion—Everyone’s Favorite Subjects

Zionism is therefore far more than just a claim to a right to one’s own homeland.  It is rather a unique mixture of religion and politics with a short term goal of fulfilling the promise of a land stretching to the Euphrates River (Gen 15:18). Its long-term one is the complete subjugation or elimination of the Gentiles, as opportunity might allow.

As for the first, only when the Messiah comes (back) will greater Israel be realized, and He won’t be doing it through bloodshed and injustices against the peoples of those lands. As for the long-term goal, it is of course a delusion as the Armageddon scenario portrays in the Bible, but the earth will be devastated in the process (Dan 8:24). All this is being enabled by the support of the American-based Church world which will become an integral part of the great harlot America on the one hand (Rev 3:16; 17:3) and destroyed by the Zionists on the other anyhow (17:16).

This is the bad fruit of the Church for its ignorance and not having the proper, historical attitude towards the Jews. It is supposed to be that of a balanced, even-handed approach in the first place as outlined by Paul: “As concerning the gospel, they are enemies for your sakes: but as touching the election, they are beloved for the father’s sakes” (Ro 11:28) .  (You can add to that the wisdom of Solomon!)

For those who believe in a delusional Rapture before Tribulation, they have been tempted to egg Israel on in her crimes, thinking the mess will be left for others to clean up. For those who opt for Dominionism which is even worse, it’s a complete identity with both a Babylon-like empire (America) and its rogue tail-wagging-the-dog Israel. Good luck with getting God’s blessing to evangelize the world with that.

The only alternative is to “come out of her” and be part of a faithful remnant Church (Rev 7:3), giving out the true and simple Gospel to “whomsoever will.” This will result in a great harvest (7:9) with great miracles (Jn 14:12) during the short Great Tribulation (14:1-5). That’s why you need to get a copy of my book, American Babylon, American Antichrist, to escape the snare coming on all the earth and to position yourself to keep your own soul and be useful to God. Just click here.